RAFâs day.
At the end of that momentous week, Fighter Commandâs airplane reserves reached their lowestâjust 80 Hurricanes and 47 Spitfires.
September 15 saw the climax of the struggle. It was also the day Prime Minister Churchill chose to visit A Group Operations Headquarters, the underground command center at Uxbridge in Middlesex.
That day the German attacks on Britain came in two waves at very high altitude, 20,000 feet and higher, above radar. However, British intelligence had monitored the increased radio traffic, giving Park time to move his squadrons forward. They fought the 500 enemy aircraft all the way to London and all the way back. RAF ground crews refueled and re-armed aircraft in a frenzy of servicing whenever and at whatever airfield the pilots landed, so that from the ground it seemed as if the skies were permanently full of aircraft. Vapor trails and smoke trails scrawled the signature of battle across the summer sky.
Copyright © 2009 by Graeme Neil Reid
While the fighters of A Group fought above Kent, Sussex, and the coast, that was the day that Londonersâand the Luftwaffe pilotsâsaw 200 Hurricanes and Spitfires together above the city, Leigh-Malloryâs âbig-wingâ from B Group. All squadrons and reserves of A and all squadrons of B were scrambled that day.
Fighter Command shot down and destroyed 60 Nazi aircraft. It lost 26 fighters and 13 pilots. Two days later Hitler postponed indefinitely the invasion of Britain. Later he canceled it completely. Since the end of the 1939â45 war, that September 15 is celebrated every year. It is the Royal Air Forceâs Battle of Britain Day.
Yet the battle of Britain did not end then. It continued for the rest of the month and into October, gradually reducing in intensity as the Luftwaffe ran out of steam. Bletchley Park had decoded Hitlerâs Enigma signal of the seventeenth, postponing the invasion, as well as further military signals authorizing the dismantling of invasion air-transport units.
From September 7 to 30, Fighter Command destroyed 380 German aircraft for the loss of 178 fighters. The Luftwaffeâs brief aura of invincibility was destroyed forever. By the end of October, Göring was forced to reduce daylight attacks to mere harassing sorties and to direct his bombers tonight raids against Britain. There is a limit to the losses any military force can withstand, and the Luftwaffe had reached its own. The battle of Britain was won.
RAF Fighter Command lost 544 killed. The Luftwaffe lost 2,877: 1,176 bomber crew, 171 fighter pilots, 85 dive-bomber crew, and 1,445 missing in action, assumed killed.
In that autumn of 1940, London was bombed fifty-seven nights in succession, still a record for sustained bombing. Buckingham Palace and the Houses of Parliament were hit. The Blitz continued into 1941, culminating in a 550-bomber raid on May 10. Fighter Command had few effective night fighters at that stage of the warâno air force did, although Dowdingâs developments were soon to reap benefits with airborne intercept radar in the Bristol Beaufighter. The defense of London and other cities, meanwhile, was maintained by antiaircraft batteries.
The United Kingdom was bombed north, south, east, and west by the Luftwaffe. In particular Bath, Belfast, Birkenhead, Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Clydeside, Coventry, Exeter, Glasgow, Hull, Ipswich, Liverpool, London, Manchester, Middlesbrough, Norwich, Plymouth, Portsmouth, Sheffield, Southampton, Sunderland, Swansea, and Wolverhampton suffered heavy damage from indiscriminate night-bombing.
Winston Churchill crystallized the importance of victory in the battle of Britain in seventeen words: âNever in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.â
About 75 percent of Fighter Command pilots were commissioned officers and 25 percent were noncommissioned sergeants, although their ranks donât matter: they flew
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